Last movie watched...

[Mudcrab]

I Am Number 4 - Alien teen hiding on earth gets super-powers, turned out to be far more enjoyable than I expected. Bad guys reminded me of the bad alien from Dark Angel.

Also Chain Letter, latest teen slasher, turned out to be just as bad as I expected, shouting at annoyingly bad plot and not very clever cop. Still, it had Brad Dourif in it as a creepy teacher, who never fails to impress.

[Emperor]

Recently I watched:

Norwegian Ninja, and really you might as well watch the trailer because all the best bits and the amusing concept are in there. Stretching that out into a full length film just watered everything down to a rather unappetising soup.

The Dead, a film that I was expecting much from and I was really impressed. The switch of location really changed the emphasis and the stacks of dead bodies brought to mind some of the worst moments in recent African history, especially Rwanda. The special effects were very nicely done, considering the budget, and it is nice to see the return of the slow zombie after the dominance of the fast zombie/infected in recent years - they work really well in keeping the pressure on the main characters. Not perfect but it is one of the better zombie films of the last decade (and I have watched more than most people would consider sensible, more than I think is wise given the awful quality you can find out there).

Ice From the Sun, a film I'd read about when it came out but never got around to watching and when I did it really wasn't worth it. The concept is high enough but the delivery is dismal - huge chunks of cod fantasy exposition clunkily dropped in and even the gory scenes fans say make up for the cheapness were pretty weak fare. Some of it was stylishly filmed but other parts were worse than you'd have thought someone could manage with a cheap video camera and their friends sitting around, all of which made the film feel like the odd collision of a budget early NIN video and a low quality home movie. It is going to be quite a while before I see any other films from Eric Stanze unless someone can give him a budget to match his vision.

Immortal, a worthy attempt to create a cinematic graphic novel although it felt a bit odd mixing CGI characters with real ones and some of the former looked a little shaky. It is all very high concept, but they did rather over-emphasise the rape aspect (it is what the old gods do, I get it, let's move along now) and I'm not sure it blew my socks off though.

Martyrs, a truly punishing film, I thought I might need to stop it and take a break when I realised that I was only half way through but soldiered on as it managed to keep ramping the brutality up. I was glad I did as the ending was suitably dark and nasty. One of the more thought-provoking of the recent torture porny films (as a lot of the New French Extremity films have been), although one of the thoughts was "it might be a while before I can watch that again."

[Zarjazzer]

Fright Night (2011). Good fun and a fine updated tribute to the first version. Tennant is great but everyone involved seemed to have a good bit. Lines like "Fuc**ng e-bay!" are classic. Even Chris Sarandon makes an appearance. Surprisingly enjoyable.

[Gonk]

Olivier's 1983 film for t.v. version of Shakespeare's play "King Lear". I prefer to see this acted in contemporary costumes and settings, rather than watching actors performing in modern day suits as
I think it spoils the atmosphere of it.

[HOO-HAA]

We watched Final Destination 5 last night. Really enjoyed it, even if it is a mirror image of the rest of the series. The bridge scene at the start was excellent (even if a little sloppy with the ol' CGI). Loads of gorey kills and silly humour. The ending was particularly clever, wrapping the series up rather nicely.

It's big, stupid fun with a capital F

[mygrimmbrother]

Recently I watched:

Norwegian Ninja, and really you might as well watch the trailer because all the best bits and the amusing concept are in there. Stretching that out into a full length film just watered everything down to a rather unappetising soup.

The Dead, a film that I was expecting much from and I was really impressed. The switch of location really changed the emphasis and the stacks of dead bodies brought to mind some of the worst moments in recent African history, especially Rwanda. The special effects were very nicely done, considering the budget, and it is nice to see the return of the slow zombie after the dominance of the fast zombie/infected in recent years - they work really well in keeping the pressure on the main characters. Not perfect but it is one of the better zombie films of the last decade (and I have watched more than most people would consider sensible, more than I think is wise given the awful quality you can find out there).

Ice From the Sun, a film I'd read about when it came out but never got around to watching and when I did it really wasn't worth it. The concept is high enough but the delivery is dismal - huge chunks of cod fantasy exposition clunkily dropped in and even the gory scenes fans say make up for the cheapness were pretty weak fare. Some of it was stylishly filmed but other parts were worse than you'd have thought someone could manage with a cheap video camera and their friends sitting around, all of which made the film feel like the odd collision of a budget early NIN video and a low quality home movie. It is going to be quite a while before I see any other films from Eric Stanze unless someone can give him a budget to match his vision.

Immortal, a worthy attempt to create a cinematic graphic novel although it felt a bit odd mixing CGI characters with real ones and some of the former looked a little shaky. It is all very high concept, but they did rather over-emphasise the rape aspect (it is what the old gods do, I get it, let's move along now) and I'm not sure it blew my socks off though.

Martyrs, a truly punishing film, I thought I might need to stop it and take a break when I realised that I was only half way through but soldiered on as it managed to keep ramping the brutality up. I was glad I did as the ending was suitably dark and nasty. One of the more thought-provoking of the recent torture porny films (as a lot of the New French Extremity films have been), although one of the thoughts was "it might be a while before I can watch that again."

Thanks for that Emp, been wanting a couple of new things to track down. At first I thought you meant the dreadful 'Immortals', which was the latest in a recent long line of films to be switched off in our hourse after 20-30 minutes. But the link to that one looks interesting. Martyrs I have seen and have a lot of admiration for - sounds odd to phrase it like that I know, but I don't know how else to say I liked it without actually saying 'I liked it'. Because like is wrong, but it's a great film.

[Professor Bear]

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Director's Cut, which on a whim I decided to swap with Star Wars as the movie put on to help me nod off of an evening.  It really is a very slow film, but not actually uninteresting.
I think their plan was to emulate 2001 with all the slow pans of the Enterprise ("it's only a model!") and long tracking shots through Vger's interior, but this isn't the script that would justify such trappings, it's a retread of a plot the show saw a couple of times already by that point and nothing seems to be developed significantly to be interesting enough to hold the film together, be it the Decker/Baldy Woman lovestory, Kirk's being too rusty to be a space hero, the Enterprise not being ready for service, Spock's personal journey, and so on - nothing seems to go anywhere or be resolved in any meaningful way, not even allegorically as might be assumed by the joining of Decker/Baldy Woman and Vger at the end.  It is pretty good for nodding off to, I must admit, and I will always find TNG just straight lifting the theme from this to be hilarious, though I can't tell you why.
Shatner doesn't seem to really be playing this as Kirk as much as he is a generic officer type absent the smarmy charm that makes him so iconic, Decker is not a great acting turn by any stretch, and there is not enough of Spock the anti-hippy and his magnificent 1970s hairdo, but the production side of things is pretty great, especially the brief glimpse of Vulcan which made a kind of comeback in that better-than-I-thought-on-first-viewing Enterprise two-parter where you find out that it really is a total shithole of a planet to live on.  If continuity-watching is your bag, Spock seems to be taking the Kolinar thingy to purge emotions in this, but the rebooted Trek establishes this as something he took as a very young man (long before he encountered Kirk's altered timeline) rather than as a magnificent anti-hippy.
In all, I'm not sure what I make of this: it's a competent film full of snooze-inducing scenes and I find it hard to muster animosity about any of it, but I would recommend it to no-one to actually sit down and watch.

[SmallBlueThing]

Oddly, it's by far my favourite of all the trek movies (though i confess ive never seen a couple of the next generation ones because, well, life's too short!) and what i love most of all is, as you rightly mention, the attempts to mirror 2001 in the visuals and stately pacing of the story. There's a certain pretension toward intellectualism about st:tmp that is familiar if youre aware of the post-tv show, pre-next gen novels and contemporary star trek fandom in general. There was a time when trek was honestly lauded as the only 'proper' science fiction on the screen- as challenging and mind expanding as the novels of clarke, asimov and heinlein, etc. I see st:tmp as an attempt to continue that, to do sf 'properly', in reaction to star wars and its thinly-disguised fantasy of wizards and evil tyrants.

Yes, its an abject failure in that respect- and much of the most interesting bits were recycled by later trek, so now seem cliched. Decker and Ilia are Riker and Troi obviously, even down to the structure of

[SmallBlueThing]

(cont) their names, and their relationship is identical. Bu for all that, i love its slow pace, lack of gunfights, and that it at least tries to have something to say.

SBT

[TordelBack]

(cont) their names, and their relationship is identical.

SBT

Yup, if memory serves the new characters of ST:TMP are all stolen from Star Trek 2, the mooted 70's precursor to ST:TNG, the unfilmed scripts for quite a few episodes of which survive (I had a book of them that I lent to a Canadian, never to see it again).  Not content with recycling them and killing them off for the movie, they were then used again, along with several plots, in Next Generation.  Almost as thrifty as Lucas, that Roddenberry.

[Emperor]

Thanks for that Emp, been wanting a couple of new things to track down.

And some to avoid I hope too - I couldn't recommend Ice From the Sun to anyone, although I'm sure there are people out there who would like it more than I did (and who aren't friends of the director ).

If you fancy giving The Dead a spin* then make a double bill of it with Stake Land, if you haven't seen it already - another pleasant surprise that breathed a bit of new life into a genre in danger of getting stale.

At first I thought you meant the dreadful 'Immortals', which was the latest in a recent long line of films to be switched off in our hourse after 20-30 minutes. But the link to that one looks interesting.

Martyrs I have seen and have a lot of admiration for - sounds odd to phrase it like that I know, but I don't know how else to say I liked it without actually saying 'I liked it'. Because like is wrong, but it's a great film.

Yes, telling someone who managed to sit through it all (there are tales of people retching in the cinema and others walking out) that you "liked it" might make them them reassess whether they'd want to be left alone in a room with you. I certainly... appreciated it, as it wasn't just violence for the sake of it, in some ways [spoiler]the viewer goes through an ordeal alongside the girl, we just don't quite get the same moment of enlightenment at the end, which is as it should be, explaining it couldn't possibly meet our expectations (in some ways it is a bit like Kill List).[/spoiler]

* It has split viewers but if you look at IMDB most of the haters are people who firmly believe that the slow zombie should be a thing of the past, of course, they are countered by those who believe the fast zombie to be heresy, so if you are in the latter group, or are with me in a group of people who'd like to crack all their silly heads together** then you should be OK.

** There is clearly room for both and the type gives you a different feel to the film. Luckily all those pointless arguments have inspired a story I'm in the early stages of planning out, so it has some uses.

[Professor Bear]

i love its slow pace, lack of gunfights, and that it at least tries to have something to say.

Wrath of Kahn proved you didn't have to be quite so boring as ST:tMP to be a worthy character piece and comment upon larger themes, being as it was packaged and marketed as a shlocky b-movie yet is ultimately a story about a man's midlife crisis.  I'm all for giving credit for trying even if you fail, but Trek tried and succeeded with Kahn, retroactively making tMP a lesser enterprise in my eyes.

As for skipping later TNG flicks, I do envy you your self-control in keeping away as you can at least cling to the belief that they might possibly be good films rather than serviceable pulp adventures ruined by the constant presence of Mr Bastard Data and his stupid fucking face that I hate.

[Beaky Smoochies]

The TNG movies had such potential, but all were ultimately hamstrung by poor and/or rushed scripts, overly tight post-production schedules, and the need to serve The Franchise rather than serve the material, a shame as I really loved the series... and the second, third, fourth, and sixth Star Trek movies are still classics that wipe the floor with Abrams' reboot (as good and entertaining as it was)!

[WhitBloke]

Every Which Way But Loose.  What can I tell you?  I reread "Death of a Politician" and missed Mayor Dave.  ("Right turn, Mayor Dave!")

[HdE]

Godzilla 2000.

Bonkers, brilliant fun.